Last Sunday I read an article about how the drug culture had invaded the Mennonite colonies of Northern Mexico. Mennonite kids were being arrested for drug running and hard-core crack houses were showing up among the farmhouses and chicken coops.
I read the story with the same melancholy I felt when I read that the untainted coast of Alaska had been soiled by oil from an Exxon tanker.
Serpents, it seems, always find a way to worm their way into Eden — no matter where it is.
The Mennonite story was especially hard on me because I've spent time in those colonies and have friends there. The Mennonites, like the Amish, are a tight-knit band of religious souls who cling for dear life to tradition, to God and to each other. And their "all-for-one" lifestyle has intrigued me since I was a boy.
So five years ago I went down to Northern Mexico to get to know them.
As luck — or Providence — would have it, I was led to the door of Johan Neufeldt, the one Mennonite who loved to gab, had no qualms about sharing secrets and enjoyed giving strangers a tour of the town.
"Town" consisted of a cheese plant, a church, a store, a school and one public telephone.
After that, it was all fields and farmhouses.
And I was charmed.
In the cemetery, every grave was unmarked. The Mennonites take humility very seriously. In the cornfields, the Mennonite girls gave me so many curious glances I felt like a bear riding a bicycle. Perhaps a bear would have seemed less exotic. The benches in the church were hard wood, with no backs. The cheese plant was all hand-driven.
At Johan's home, his wife, Edith, served me fresh, warm milk, hot bread and churned butter. She sat it all on a table covered with an oilcloth, the kind my grandmother used.
A kerosene lamp burned in the corner. The quilts on the beds were 3 inches thick.
I'd never felt so close to home — yet so far from home — in my life.
Once back in Utah, all those memories lingered. I wrote to Johan and he wrote back — sending newsy, personal letters that sounded like the old early-morning radio program, "This Business of Farming." At one point, I sent him some photos and Mormon handicrafts.
I didn't hear back.
I wrote again.
No reply.
Finally, six months later, I got a letter from Johan — in Bolivia. He said the religious elders of his colony decided the modern world had gotten too much of a foothold in their community and they had moved everyone south to safer ground. At the time, I naively thought by "modern world" Johan meant electric light bulbs and rubber tires.
I had no inkling of how "contaminated" the lives of the Mennonites had become.
In the letter, Johan said he and Edith were well. He was doing a lot of reading, he said, and had begun singing in a Mennonite choir. He gave me a full weather report and filled me in on local crop yield.
He never did get the photographs or the handicrafts I'd sent. My guess is the Mennonite elders intercepted and kept them. The last thing they wanted was another outsider making inroads into their lives. The Mennonites had gone to Bolivia looking for a place untainted by human tampering — not unlike the Mormon pioneers coming to the Great Basin.
And in Bolivia, Johan and his companions found a country that is remote, rural and very traditional.
They have also found a country that makes a cash crop of the coca leaf — the source of crack cocaine.
E-mail: jerjohn@desnews.com